Problems with the front end

Back in business. Had some lack of inspiration (in addition to a lot of mandatory work which couldn't wait), thus the long pause since last post. No worries, not much has happened since.

I have made part of the side and most of the front area. The front especially gives me headache: it seems I have no idea what I'm trying to model and the blueprints are not helping much. Now the front end remind a front end of a car driven into a wall. Not good. Better get back to the drawing board.

Something I've learned since last post: When deleting edges, holding Ctrl deletes the edge's vertexes as well. No need to do that manually from here.

Keeping you up to date

I have done some experimenting with the surface of the hood. There is a small bulge at the center for now, we'll see if I end up changing the shape of it later on. I also tried to seek for a same sort of color I spotted in a new'ish Civic another day. It was hard to say if it was brown or purple but in an overcast day it looked spectacular. The color was probably Kona Coffee Metallic I think. Link here just in case you are curious.

Sorry for the dark image. The material is also just a plain Arch&Design meaning there is not much depth or detail in the paint. If I used mental ray's Car Paint material the rendering would take way too long and since there is no environment what so ever it wouldn't make much difference.

Something to show already

Hey! The new car is slowly gaining progress. A bit faster than I expexted actually, it's amazing how much faster things start to roll when you have a little experience from a previous project at your belt. The blueprints are set up and already I have modelled a part of the front of the car. I have kept the model rather simple and thus there are no chamfers or such. There is a Turbosmooth added to the wireframe.

Things I have found useful at this point if there happens to be beginner modelers reading this:
- Shortucts, shortcuts and shortcuts. Target weld can be found with Ctrl+Shift+W, and the movement of verticles can be limited to polygon edges only with Shift+X. Oh, and the polygon cut can be accessed with Alt+C. More useful shortcuts can be found here. You might also want to assign hotkeys of your own. I added weld to my shortcut list. Instructions here.
- Try to keep to polycount down. It will make fixing the model much easier once you notice you have a bunch of verticles int the wrong place.
- Use Smooth Groups. In my case I don't want to add chamfers just yet but I want to keep sharp edges around headlights and fenders. I changed the smoothgroup of the sharp edged polys and added checkmark in Turbosmooth menu "Separate->Smooth Groups".

A couple of photos

Just noticed I forgot to add a couple of my favorite shots to the photographpy-section. Better late than never! The Italians are photographed at Bella Italia last year, Shelby and Veyron were shot at Berlin and the Audi at Tampere.

The first two are propably my very favorite photos. With the orange Cobra I was seriously lucky to get a sharp photo. I heard a muscle roar from the distance but did not know what was coming, focused the camera to the road between the bushes since I knew there wouldn't be enough time to focus the car itself. Once the car came to view, "snap", got it! 

The next project about to get serious

Finally got to make blueprints for the next project. The older side render and pictures from sketch pad worked as a base. I didn't have much vision for the front image at first but it turned out pretty neat. Actually I had to made some changes to other images to match the front, not the other way around. 

I used blueprints of a Maserati Granturismo to get the basic measurements of a front engined car in place. I wanted to keep the rear axle really far at the back and the same with the windshield. Due to the rear located axle, though, I faced a problem of the rear of the car reminding a cube from top view. It might be I have to bring the rear axle a bit more closer to front but it can be done afterwards with the 3D model so I think I leave it like this for now.

Time to start the 3D Studio Max for a long time it seems! 

The start of something new

Lot of time has spent skeching the next project already. Finally the side profile started to look satisfying and I thought why not to make a quick render with Photoshop and share with you guys. Like I said earlier the layout will be front engined this time and that is propably the thing that makes the design so much more difficult. I have always preferred mid-engined cars when it comes to drawing and skeching but it was about time to do something different.

The rear end of car is getting a shape but the front view is still a bit of black box. We'll see how it goes!

New renderings of the Stiletto

Finally found time to make some more renderings as promised! I noticed the flakes were a bit too large in the car paint material so I scaled those down a bit. The change made it unfortunately to the engine bay render only.

I uploaded the full resolution pictures to my dropbox. You can view those by clicking the link under the previews.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

I have already made some skeches of the next car project. It will look quite a bit different due to the front engined layout. Pics will appear later on!